Past Misdeeds: The White Reindeer (1952)

Original title: Valkoinen Peura

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The birth of Pirita stands under a bad star, with her mother  desperately racing through the snows of Lapland to give birth to her in the warmth of somebody's tent, and then dying during birth. The owners of said tent take Pirita in as their own daughter. They may be relatives of her mother, but the film does not explain this, nor why Pyrite's mother wasn't giving birth at her home, nor if she even had one, but the staging of the scenes makes it quite clear that the baby's birth is not exactly accompanied by good omens.

Still, Pirita (now played by co-writer and wife of director Erik Blomberg Mirjami Kuosmanen) grows up into a beautiful and happy young (well, Kuosmanen was close to forty at that point, but that's not really a problem here) woman. She and strapping reindeer herder Aslak (Kalervo Nissilä) fall in love and marry. However, as a herder, Aslak is away from home for long stretches, and Pirita misses him painfully. So she goes to visit the local shaman (Arvo Lehesman) to ask him for a love potion.

The shaman agrees to help her, but questioning the spirits doesn't exactly achieve the results anyone would have hoped for. The shaman prophecies Pirita will be irresistible to all men if she sacrifices the first living thing she sees on her return home at an altar, but the shaman also foresees a fate too horrible to speak of. Something - perhaps based on her birth - takes possession of Pirita at that moment, and she is fated to continue the process she has begun, walking through the next scenes like somebody submitting to the inevitable. So even though the first living thing Pirita sees on her return home is a white reindeer calf her husband gave her as a token of his love, she still can't escape sacrificing it.

Afterwards, Pirita becomes quite popular with the male population, though she seemed to attract men before she let the spirits put a spell on her quite well already, and Aslak never was anything but in love with her. The truth about the spell is something quite different anyway: by the light of the full moon, Pirita turns into a white reindeer that irresistibly draws men into hunting her, following her alone into the wilderness. Once the animal is alone with them, far from help, it turns back into a Pirita with fangs and claws who kills the man she has drawn away.

In a population as close-knit and full of knowledge of the old ways (it's impossible to call it superstition, for in the context of the movie, it's all true), this sort of situation can't hold up for long, and soon every Lapp in the area knows that the white reindeer is a witch killing men. It's only a question of time until they make spears of cold iron and kill her; and if you know the sort of story this is, you'll already know who will be the man to do it in the end.

I couldn't find out much about the era in the Finnish film industry when Valkoinen Peura was made (there's quite a bit of material online about the 1930s and 40s and then the 90s and onward, but little specifics about the period in between) though I am quite sure that Erik Blomberg's film wasn't typical of the output of the country's three major studios. The film seems too personal and too idiosyncratic for a pure entertainment, yet also seems far away from everything that would later become arthouse movies. If you're from Finland and know better, please correct me.

Stylistically, the film uses two very different approaches to filmmaking. The parts of the film concerned with the day to day life of the Lapps are filmed close to the style of a documentary (Blomberg having made more documentaries than feature films, this isn't exactly a surprise) with a major eye for the telling detail, and the patience to just let things happen on screen in their own time. These scenes make clear that Blomberg is highly interested in a feeling of veracity and authenticity, treating Lapp culture with a respect you don't generally see in films of the 50s for anything or anyone not in the mainstream culture of the country they were made in. If Blomberg got everything right about Lapp culture is quite another question, though not one I'm knowledgeable enough to answer. For the purposes of the film and this review it's probably enough to know that Blomberg strives for and achieves a feeling of veracity.

At first, this documentarian part of the film seems to rub against the way Blomberg stages most of the appearances of the supernatural, with highly expressionist lighting and editing that might just as well have been taken from a German silent movie of the 20s; even the acting tends to a certain wide-eyed and melodramatic style in these scenes, and Blomberg clearly prefers silent actors making expressive faces while dramatic music plays to dialogue - in fact, quite a few scenes seem to be shot without sound at all.

Instead of lending a schizophrenic feel to the film, both stylistic directions are well integrated into each other: all scenes that deal with day to day practicalities are shot in the more mundane documentary style, and the moments that deal with the vagaries of the human heart and the supernatural are made all the more emotionally powerful by being staged quite differently. This is particularly effective when Pirita's curse (really, I'm tempted to use the word "wyrd" here, even though it is culturally inappropriate) begins to infect her daily life with her husband and a scene that would have been shot bright and clear at the film's start, now is full of shadows and ambiguity.


If I were in a blithe mood, I'd call Valkoinen Peura the best movie about a were reindeer you'll ever see, but apart from being, you know, blithe, it would also mean selling the film quite short. There aren't many movies trying to take on the feeling of myth and legend while at the same time attempting to be truthful towards more mundane realities, and even fewer succeeding at it. Blomberg's film absolutely nails the right mood, and tells the right story in just the right way, resulting in a film singing with its own bleak kind of poetry.